


can't be helped

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Emetophobia, Gen, Mutual Pining, Somewhat Ambiguous Ending, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 20:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20681534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: He is certain that his longing is poison: that it bleeds from him in all directions and withers everything it touches. Can’t they feel it? His neighbors, his coworkers, the people on the street. Don’t they know how much he wants? Don’t they know that all he is anymore is wanting?“It can’t be helped,” says Peter. And Peter is pleased.





	can't be helped

At some point—and to Peter’s silent delight—Martin gives in.

He gives in the way a collapsing house collapses—slowly, by pieces, and then all at once. He doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or doesn’t care to know, the exact day, the moment, the choice, and now—having given in so much already—it hardly seems to matter.

He becomes aware of it, mostly, when he begins to change, and his first inkling of that change scares him so much that for a moment he thinks he has been spared—that this rush of fear and feeling will undo all of Peter’s work in an instant—but in the end the first wave of real Loneliness is just _disappointing_. When Martin sits back from the bin into which he’s just vomited, on the cold concrete Institute floor, and smears a shaking hand across his mouth and pulls it away sticky with something black, that is all he feels: disappointment. A flat _oh. _As if he should have expected something more. As if he deserved something more.

He doesn’t ask Peter, but Peter, for once, tells him anyway.

“It’s joy, I expect,” he says, in his calm, unwavering tone, always with its slight backing of amusement. Martin isn’t amused. “Joy is usually the first thing to go.”

Martin feels very empty.

* * *

The first one hurts the most. For a brief moment it hurts so much that Jon is certain he is going to pass out. It opens with a wet, ripping, violent _shnick _on the back of his hand, where a moment before a pockmark scar the circumference of a worm had been, and where now, looking placidly up at him, is a slick white eyeball. It opens on a Tuesday afternoon while he is in the middle of grinding through a statement, without fanfare or warning. The sound he makes is strangled. The feeling—in the starburst of sudden agony behind his brain he imagines dog teeth, tearing, from the inside.

When the shockwave passes Jon hisses out a hasty _end recording _and jams down the button on his tape recorder. His hand—the seeing one—is throbbing, pulsing, as if it’s been slammed in a car door. He brings it gingerly up into the light, places it palm-down on the desk.

The eye looks up at him blankly. Its pupil is a dull gold. It doesn’t blink. It does move, though—slides, unhurriedly, following his face as he leans away from it.

Experimentally, his breath coming short, Jon flexes his fingers, curls them inward. The eye is a sickening new weight on the bones of his hand. It stays where it is. Bulbous and looking. He thinks, horribly, of an egg yolk. He is dimly aware of a new angle of the ceiling over him.

The office is empty. The tape recorder is quiet. No static jumping from it. Not a sound anywhere. No one to see, except him.

* * *

Joy takes a long time to purge. At least, Martin assumes it is still joy. He hadn’t been aware he contained so much of it.

He comes to think of it as tar, the sticky slick black stuff that comes out of him. It’s easier to parse it as _tar _than _emotion. _Sometimes it spills from his mouth; sometimes it spills from his eyes. He begins to prefer (as much as he can prefer anything anymore) to weep it. Weeping, at least, is still easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world. It comes most easily of all just after the Institute has emptied for the evening, when Martin sits in the room where Peter has stashed him and feels the building lose its inhabitants, one by one, streaming out the doors and into cars or buses or taxi cabs or down the pavement. He feels every one like the loss of an individual limb. That is when it’s easiest to cry. They’ll be back tomorrow, he knows. The ones in Artifact Storage and the ones in the library and the researchers. Basira and Melanie and Daisy and. (And.) But in the hour after they’ve gone it is a simple thing to feel purposely and vindictively abandoned.

Sometimes he cries so hard that he makes himself sick. Sometimes he cries so hard he cannot sit up, must double over, hold himself. But he supposes he must be doing something right. Hours later, when the Loneliness seems done with him for the present, and he comes back to himself with a face covered in black smears, weak with weeping, he does feel—emptier, if not better. Cleaner. Sometimes on his walk home, passersby smile at him politely. He keeps his head down and his pace steady. If he smiled back, he thinks, they would catch on. They’d see right through him.

* * *

He worries about Martin. Constantly, a low hum at the base of his skull. Part of it, he imagines, is Beholding, frustrated that there is something in its temple that it cannot See. For once Jon sympathizes with it. With every new eye that sprouts from a scar on his skin he wonders if this will be the one, the one that can see through the jagged static that hides Peter Lukas and Martin from him.

He has eight or nine of them now. He isn’t sure of the number. If they are opening on his back he cannot see them and isn’t about to ask anyone to look for him. They do not see the way he sees; trying to look through them is like trying to look through his elbow. If they see anything, he Knows it. He Knows about glances exchanged behind his back, Knows why Melanie was late for work one morning, Knows when one of Helen Richardson’s doors opens quietly in the hallway outside his office, and then closes again.

They irritate him, the eyes. Each new one that opens hurts less than the one before—a mercy—but he is always forgetting they are there, touching them by accident, feeling their cold wet gelatinous surfaces under his fingers or beneath his clothes. He hopes that soon the Eye will teach him how to close them, so he can get on with the important things. Reading statements. Asking questions. Looking for Martin.

_Please stop finding me. _But Jon isn’t built for that anymore. He’s heard the tapes. They haunt him, quietly, at a distance. Martin’s quavering bravado. Martin’s sobbing. For him. For all of them. Heavier than the eyes on his arms and throat is the sheer weight of his guilt and regret.

When he sleeps, or tries to sleep, all his new eyes stay wide open, searching the shadows for the things that might be lurking there.

* * *

Pleasure hurts more to lose than joy. It burns, welling up in his eyes. Stings coming up his throat. Martin doesn’t bother calling in. Peter will figure out why he is gone. It feels as if someone with very sharp nails is scraping his insides, peeling long sinuous strands of him apart, slowly and deliberately.

He stays in bed, curled up on his side, staring at the blank wall opposite. The tar runs out of his tear-ducts in thick, ropy rivulets, down onto his sheets, pooling there, soaking in. He doesn’t care. He’d bought himself these sheets for his birthday a few years before—they were expensive. He had liked the pattern. He had liked the idea of someone seeing them someday and remarking on them. Little things like that had always made him smile; he had liked that about himself. A new book. A little cactus in a pot. A picture frame from the charity shop. None of it matters now. The sheets are ruined; he supposes eventually he’ll throw them out, when they’ve soaked up as much of him as they can take.

When he has the will to get up, to go to the window, the streets outside are empty. That is, he knows they aren’t empty—they are the same streets as always, populated with the same people, going about their lives, ducking in and out of buildings, savoring the sun or the rain. But they’re thinner, somehow. Less real.

Martin practices smiling in the mirror. It is a pathetic exercise. The tears he cries in the mirror, at least, are human.

* * *

The others are avoiding him unless it is absolutely necessary to speak to him. Jon minds this more than he’d care to admit. He knows why, and doesn’t blame them. It can’t be easy to talk to someone who is looking back at you with twenty different eyes. In his office, alone, the ticking of the clock drives him insane.

In the absence of company he feeds instead, on statements, on the sound of his own voice. He has dug through every drawer and filing cabinet and banker’s box in the office looking for scraps, stories he hasn’t read before. The vast majority of them are bland and tasteless and he is hungry again as soon as he has finished. There are still hundreds more to be read and analyzed and catalogued but he is impatient. More and more impatient, more and more hungry, more and more restless. No one has seen Martin in weeks. He has tried to be surreptitious about asking, worried that too much probing around will disrupt whatever Martin is planning, but it’s difficult to pretend he cares less than he does.

The Eye urges him to be academic in his caring. Passivity; observation; digestion. But for now he still has the freedom of movement and the freedom of will to worry. He doesn’t know how long it will last. Sometimes Jon thinks he catches something—a flicker in the hallway, an echo, something that makes the eyes in his skin blink open and turn all at once in one direction—but it’s not enough to See, let alone to Know. Maybe it is Martin. Maybe not.

In the last two weeks Jon has grown an inch, and his fingers are longer than they were before, though not by much, and his skin feels papery, dry.

He notices all of this, but there isn’t anything he can do. He is tired of pretending that there is. He belongs to something else now, for better or worse. (Worse.) It can’t be helped.

* * *

If anything, peace is more brutal a loss than pleasure or joy, and it hits when Martin is hunched over a recorder, listening to the garbled broken speech of someone’s brush with Extinction. It’s a wave of bone-deep cold—he drops the pen he had been taking notes with—he fumbles for the wastebin but it’s too late. Black tar spilling from his mouth. He is shaking so hard he can practically hear his teeth rattling in his head, and when a hand comes to rest on the back of his skull he flinches violently.

It’s Peter; he knows without looking up. Not that he could see anything through his filmy eyes.

The hand moves once through his hair, a bastard approximation of comfort. Then again. Peter’s skin is dry. He has no temperature. His nails drag unpleasantly across Martin’s scalp, send chills racing across his skin.

Martin sobs once, a broken sound, more of frustration than sadness—slumps in his chair and tries to catch his breath. His eyes are burning. Still Peter is touching him, stroking his hair, leaning over him, and he has never felt anything worse—it makes bile rise in his throat. He looks at him painfully, his mouth sticky, and cowers away from him, from his hand, from his detached and scrutinizing grey eyes.

“I would say that I’m sorry about all this,” says Peter, “but I don’t feel like lying to you.”

Martin tries to say something—he isn’t sure what. It comes out in a stammer, gibberish. He gives up. Swallows, pulls his knees up to his chest, buries his face in them.

“It’s easier in the long run,” says Peter. The tinnitus whine of his voice coils and prickles in Martin’s ear. He’s going to be sick again. “Honestly, Martin, this is all excellent progress. These aren’t things you need anymore.”

Martin doesn’t care. He wants Peter to go away. He wants to be alone, to wait out this shivering, clean himself up, go home, cry, sleep for a week. Lock himself inside his flat and speak to no one.

Peter leaves, eventually, as soundlessly and unremarkably as he always does. The phantom drag of his fingers through Martin’s hair lingers, though, and does not subside until the shaking does, too.

* * *

“Spare a smoke?” says the voice from the alleyway, and Jon pauses. Underneath his coat his eyes are well-hidden, but he is realizing he doesn’t really need them to Know the important things. Here, for example, though his mind spins immediately toward anglerfish, he Knows the young man standing just out of the rain is just a young man, entirely human, peering out at him from beneath his hoodie and ballcap.

Jon stopped smoking last year, but he still keeps a pack in his satchel. He mumbles something, reaches into it, feels for it at the bottom among crumpled notebook paper and loose change.

Then something enters his mind—gently, slowly, like a creeping vine. Something dark. Wet. Cold. Tastes like iron—iron and grease. It is coming from the man in the alley, no more obvious than the passing scent of perfume.

But he smells it.

It’s wrong.

So everyone tells him.

But it can’t be helped.

He looks at the man in the alley and closes his hand around the pack of cigarettes.

“**What will you give me in exchange?**” says Jon.

For a moment, the man looks at him blankly, confused. And then his eyes widen—just a little—and then a little more, and his mouth begins to tremble. Then he opens it, and begins to speak.

Fifteen minutes later Jon leaves the alley without his pack of cigarettes, feeling full for the first time in weeks. His head is swimming; ecstatic colors are floating like ribbons behind his eyes. The Flesh, for all its faults, tastes delicious.

* * *

Peter is right. It _is _easier, in the long run. Easier to go unnoticed; easier to pass coworkers in the hallways and only distantly understand their laughter or their conversation. Joy exists, but not for him. On one rare occasion when someone he vaguely remembers from Artifact Storage tries to have a chat with him in the break room, it is almost interesting—but not quite—to watch the man’s smile fade, his shoulders hunch a little, discomfort ripple over him. He doesn’t look quite _at _Martin—more through him. And he moves on pretty quickly, leaving Martin—again—alone, with only the humming of the microwave for company.

It’s easier to be isolated when the things that bring people close don’t function in him anymore. Comfort, cameraderie, interest. Each individual fit of sickness and tears is more violent than the last. Existing in the middle of them is the only time he feels real: wants to call out, get up, flee; wants someone’s arms around him; wants someone to tell him that he’ll be alright when this is all over, even if it isn’t true. Longing, he has gathered, is a good thing, in small doses. It keeps his pain and anxiety sharp. The Lonely thrives on that.

Sometimes Peter holds him, which makes things worse—he supposes that’s the point. Peter will pick him up off the floor, make a cursory effort to wipe away his sticky black tears. Being held by him is like being held by sticks and stones. No warmth, no smell. Just nagging claustrophobia and a sense of wrong. He begins to wonder if everyone will feel that way to him, now. Dry, distant—mocking him, mimicking the motions of caring.

Martin is a ghost in his flat. When he passes by the curtains they no longer sway in his wake. It takes effort to turn taps and open doors. He has to remind himself constantly that he exists—that he has weight and presence. His veins show up bright blue under his skin now. When he looks in the mirror, it declines to look back.

He longs for Jon most of all. The Lonely likes that about him. It reminds him cheerfully that, in all likelihood, Jon has forgotten that he exists. Why would he waste his precious time thinking about Martin? Translucent little Martin, without joy or peace or substance, haunting his grey little flat, shutting himself away. His soft and innocent daydreams, of Jon’s hand on his shoulder, Jon’s rare laughter and crooked smiles, have turned sour. He daydreams now of Jon in pain. Jon looking endlessly for him through mazes of stone walls and dusty cobwebs and finding nothing. Jon, repulsed by him, by how much he has lost of himself. (And for what?)

He wants more than anything to go back in time—before the Unknowing, before Sasha, before Prentiss—back to when Jon hardly cared to give him the time of day, when things were simpler, when he was content in his daydreams. But he can’t go back. Isn’t that the point?

He is certain that his longing is poison: that it bleeds from him in all directions and withers everything it touches. Can’t they feel it? His neighbors, his coworkers, the people on the street. Don’t they know how much he wants? Don’t they know that all he is anymore is wanting? Something is going to break in him soon, more than it has already broken.

“It can’t be helped,” says Peter. And Peter is pleased.

* * *

There is a tape recorder on Jon’s desk, and it isn’t his. It is placed very neatly in the dead center of his tea-stained blotter. It could almost be one of his, but the color is wrong—the buttons are different shapes. The tape inside is white. All of his are black.

He sits and looks at it. All of his eyes look at it too.

No one has been in or out of his office all day. He has had at least three eyes on the door at all times. He had gotten up to look for something on the bookshelf and when he turned back the thing was there—had popped quietly into existence without his notice.

There is a faint hum of static when he tries to Know about it. A blank wall of noise. It fades when he removes his concentration. The tape recorder simply sits there, waiting.

Jon glances up toward the door, but the hall outside is quiet. Daisy and Basira are out today on a fact-finding mission. Melanie won’t look at him anymore. He is alone. The clock over his head is ticking loudly. Beholding—the increasing presence at the nape of his neck that he has come to think of as Beholding—is quiet; nothing to indicate that the thing is dangerous.

He hesitates for just a moment before he presses the _play _button on the recorder that isn’t his.

He watches the tape spindles begin to spin, smoothly.

At first there is no sound except for the gentle whirring of the machine. He listens hard, for anything—whispers, static. The tape is silent. His own breathing is louder. Jon leans his head a little closer, straining for sound.

Nothing is audible for three minutes and fourteen seconds, and then through the pops and crackles of magnetic tape he hears the sound of someone crying.

Jon sits back a little in his chair. It is too quiet to distinguish a voice, a character to the sound. But whoever it is their weeping is agonized. The spindles keep turning, and Jon’s frown deepens as the noise gets louder—whimpers distending into soft piteous moans, gathering volume into long, drawn, hiccuping sobs—worse and worse as the minutes click by—Jon feels a prickle of familiarity at the back of his neck where Beholding sits and his spine straightens a little, suddenly.

It’s Martin. The eyes on his skin widen in surprise and rage.

He grabs at the recorder and lifts it closer to his face, to hear it better, to be sure. And he is sure. It’s Martin weeping on the tape, his sobs eaten up by bursts of whining static, and it just _keeps going, _his crying growing louder and more miserable and more desperate until it is far louder than the speakers of the tape recorder should allow. He has never heard anyone cry like this before—like they are dying, like they cannot breathe. Martin gasping, choking. The noise is filling up the office like smoke—he almost feels it forcing its way into his eardrums, his mouth. He stands up—he isn’t sure why. 

Abruptly there is the noise of the tape ending, the loose ends _thwipping _against the spindles, but the sound keeps going, keeps playing strangled through the speakers, louder and louder until he is certain someone is going to fling the door open to see what the hell is going on. Jon drops the thing back onto the desk where it clatters with a plastic noise and on the tape Martin whines like he’s been slapped. He fumbles, slams the _stop _button, hits it so hard that it sticks down in place, and the spindles stop, but the sound doesn’t.

Jon feels himself beginning to panic. He can barely hear himself think over the sound of Martin’s misery. His ears are ringing. The eyes all over his body are stretched wide open to the point where he can feel them burning with how hard they are Looking. Looking at the recorder, wild and intent. Jon grabs the recorder and throws it as hard as he can across the room.

It hits the far wall and the sound stops abruptly.

For a moment, Jon stands at his desk, feeling a bead of sweat crawling down the side of his face, his breath coming hard. He feels like he’s going to be sick. He wants to cry. He cannot remember the last time he cried, but he wants to now—he could crumple in his chair and dissolve, if it weren’t for the deep, slow, hollow pit of _anger _opening up in his stomach.

When he picks up the recorder from off the floor in his too-long fingers the pieces of it come apart in his hands like the pieces of a cheap toy. The plastic joints and cracks are sticky and wet with something black that clings to his skin, stretches like chewing gum between the recorder’s components. Jon peels the white cassette tape out of the tar. Looking at it fills his head with a buzzing whine. He feels his jaw setting hard in his skull. All of his eyes are fixed on the hall outside, straining.

He cannot See inside Peter Lukas’ office, but he Knows which one it is. When he wrenches open the door with a protesting squeal of its hinges he is not surprised to see that it appears to be empty. He also knows better.

He flings the sticky, smeared pieces of the tape recorder onto the barren desk, where they sit in their ooze. All of his eyes are roving, scanning, staring, taking in every inch of the space, looking for any hint of movement. There is none. But though he cannot See Lukas he is still human enough to be able to sense a presence in a room, and there is one—patiently observing him. Hiding. Invisible. Pathetic.

“**Keep your games**,” Jon snarls, to the quiet room, “**out of my Archive**.”

His voice comes out tinny and layered with static and voices that aren’t his, louder than he’d intended. Beholding flares at the base of his skull. At any other moment this change would frighten him. Right now he doesn’t care. _He doesn’t care. _He is the biggest thing in this room, and easily the most dangerous, and he wants Lukas to know it. Wants him to _feel it. _The man is in his house, toying with _his things. _He will not have it.

His eyes catch something, and they swivel in unison to a far corner of the room, in the bare shadow of a bookcase, and Jon follows them with his own, turning his face, Looking into that space so hard and with such venom that he hopes Peter Lukas is shriveling under his stare. Withering. Turning to dust.

For an instant, Jon feels himself slip—feels his consciousness drag sideways. He is abruptly aware of the sightlines of all of his eyes—suddenly there, above his own head, watching himself watch the absence of Peter Lukas. Loneliness tastes like concrete and rainwater. He Knows Lukas is there. And when he finds out what has happened to Martin—what has conjured this horrible little white tape—when he has the chance to peel open Lukas’ skull like a piece of rotting fruit and suck him dry—if it makes him even more of a monster, it doesn’t matter. He will do it. He knows he will.

“**I will swallow you whole,” **says the Archivist.

* * *

No one ever knocks on Martin’s office door. No one, by rights, should know where it is. But someone is knocking now, and the only person he can imagine it being is the one he specifically told to stop finding him.

He doesn’t move from his desk. He stares at the vague silhouette outlined in the frosted glass, waiting patiently outside. If he were following his instructions—following his new instincts—he’d call out for Jon to go away. Leave him alone.

But he doesn’t.

He _can’t._

He stays very quiet, and very still.

“Martin?” Jon’s voice is muffled through the door.

_Come in, _Martin wants to say. He wants to scream it. _Please, please, please, please come in._

Instead, he keeps his mouth shut. He fades away just as the door opens and Jon slips inside.

He looks different. A little taller, a little bonier. The eyes peppering his flesh are new, but Martin is so used to his own changes that it hardly fazes him. He looks different, but he is still—

_Jon, _and the crashing wave of relief that comes over him when he realizes it is so alien now that it almost feels perverse. Disallowed.

Still Jon, looking as haggard and restless as ever. Jon and his long messy hair and drawn face and exhausted mouth. Still.

Just Jon.

Jon closes the door behind him with a quiet _click. _He looks around—with all of his eyes—slowly, carefully. His gaze passes right over Martin without lingering, and Martin feels both heartbroken and relieved to not have been seen.

“I know you asked me to stop finding you,” Jon says. He hesitates before he says it, as if aware that he is speaking to an empty room. His voice is hoarse and weary and underneath it Martin thinks he can hear static humming.

Martin grips the arms of his chair tight in his hands. Still Jon’s voice. Still Jon’s voice. He hasn’t heard his voice in months. He hasn’t imagined he would ever really hear it again. This isn’t allowed. But he’s starving.

(Something is welling up in him, something hot and fearful and half-remembered.)

“It’s—difficult, though.” He sighs, the sigh that Martin remembers. Jon smiles a little, sheepishly, though his face is still a mask of deep concern.

(What is it again?)

“Hard to not know where you are when I—I mean, I Know.”

(That old stubborn thing. The last thing to go.)

“Maybe we can compromise, for just a minute?”

Jon closes his eyes—all of them.

There had been a pressure in the room, Martin realizes, and he only knows it because it has lifted, suddenly.

There is an armchair opposite Martin’s desk, and Jon sits in it. He puts a hand flat on the upholstery. The eye on the back of his hand is shut tight. There is a faint grimace on Jon’s face, as if it hurts him to do this—to not Look. But he isn’t looking. He is very resolutely not looking. Breaking the rules, but only a little bit. And for Martin’s sake.

Something old prickles in Martin’s throat. Gratitude. He had almost forgotten that one.

For a long time, they sit in silence. Jon with his eyes closed in the chair. Martin, invisible, at his desk.

He doesn’t know what to do. He wasn’t prepared for this. He wants to say, _Jon. _Just feel the name in his mouth. But he doesn’t. He wants to step back into reality and reach out and touch him to be sure he is real, and here. But he doesn’t. He’s afraid.

Eventually Jon leans forward—rests his elbows on his knees and covers his face with his hands. Leans into them and sighs.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says. “I’m sorry, Martin.”

_Sorry for what?_

“I just—things are changing—with me. Here. With—all of it.”

_I know. It can’t be helped._

“And I’m—I’m scared again, Martin. I’m scared for me. I’m scared for you. I—I miss you.” Jon’s fingertips press hard into his forehead. “I am doing my best to trust you—but I’m still afraid.”

Martin looks away from him. Down at his empty desk. _I’m afraid, too, _he wants to say. But he doesn’t. _All the time, _he wants to say.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Jon says. He parts his hands and runs them back through his hair, resting at the back of his head. “I know you asked me not to be. I’m—I just wanted you to know—” He takes a breath and Martin almost feels it, stirring the room, stirring him. Jon leans back again, sitting up straighter. He clears his throat with the crackling sound of magnetic tape.

“Martin—whatever you’re doing, or planning—I trust you,” he says. “But if you need me—Martin.” Another breath, hitched. “I care so much about you.” His voice is thick and heavy and Martin feels a pricking in his eyes. Closes them for a moment. “If you need me—please come and find me.”

He swallows—his piece said, he seems to deflate again. Sinks back down, his head in his hands.

“That’s all.”

The silence stretches past that. Past them. It stretches forever.

Martin wants—he _wants. _He wants to get up and go to where Jon sits and put his arms around him. He wants to show himself and ask Jon to open his eyes. Every single one. And look at him. He wants to cry—but he is so, so tired of crying.

He wants all that—but he must be Lonely. As hard as it is. He must be. And Jon, with all his eyes, must be what he is now, too. The both of them. Two monsters sitting in a quiet room, not looking at each other. As hard as it is. As much as he wants anything else—anything different. As much as Jon wants. For now. Perhaps forever.

But he can sit here invisibly.

For a little while longer.

Just a little while longer, with Jon, while he is still Jon, and Martin is still Martin.

Maybe there is an end to this, he thinks. The Lonely recoils from that thought. He pushes it a little harder, though it hurts, a vise around his heart. Maybe after it ends there will still be enough of them left to recognize one another. Maybe that’s the best that either of them can—

There’s a word for that. He knew it once. Maybe someday he’ll know it again.


End file.
